For a fat man, Bill Glasser moved well, and he was funny, and I followed him with jokes I modeled after his around the catering hall where he was the head waiter and I was a busboy. Sometimes he let me stay late after a party to help with the last bit of cleaning up in the kitchen. Or at least that's how I remember it. I felt so privileged to spend time with him that even if he'd told me to stay it would've seemed more like a gift than a command. While he scrubbed pots and I swept and mopped the floor, he asked me questions about myself. The more he asked, the more I talked, and the more I talked the more I trusted him, and when I confided that I'd started lifting weights because I wanted to be stronger than I was, he offered to teach me exercises, using only my body and the wall, that he said would increase the weight training's effectiveness.
"Most guys your age who lift," he said, as he guided me out of the kitchen and back into the ballroom, "neglect the lower body. You need to work your legs and lower back as much as your chest and your biceps."
He told me to face the wall and put my palms flat against the wood grain paneling. "Now," he instructed, "stand on your toes." When I did, he touched my calves, thighs, and buttocks with the tip of his finger. "Do you feel it?" he asked. "The tightness? Here, here, and here? Do as many of these as you can every night before you go to bed."
The next time I saw him, he asked me to demonstrate the exercise for him so he could check my form before showing me something new. This time, as I stood on my toes, he put his knee between my upper thighs and spread them slightly. "Your feet," he said, "need to be exactly shoulder-width apart." When he was satisfied that I had the proper form, he showed me another exercise, a kind of deep knee-bend, which I practiced at home together with the toe lifts, trying to perfect them both for the next time I would be tested.
That New Years Eve, we had to work two jobs in a row, a party that didn't finish until three or four in the morning, and a New Year's Day wedding for which we had to report some hours later. When the first party was over, Bill drove me home so I could shower and nap for an hour or two while he went to his house and did the same. Then he picked me up to take me to the wedding. He and I were the first two members of the crew to arrive, and as we were setting up the tables in the main room, I complained that I was falling asleep on my feet. Bill motioned me over to where he was standing and gave me two white pills wrapped in aluminum foil. "These'll help you stay awake," he said, "but only take one at a time." I took one right away and sped through the wedding reception as if I'd never need to sleep again. When I got home I still had enough energy left over to clean my room twice, walk the dog three times, and read most of a book my high school English class had been assigned to finish over the Christmas break and that I'd left till the last minute.
Two weeks later, Bill pulled me aside as we set up for another job. "You know," he said, "those Black Beauties were expensive. Don't you think you ought to give me something for them?" I laughed the question off. After all, this was Bill, a man I'd taken as my friend and mentor. I couldn't imagine he'd really put a price on something he'd given me.
Around this time, Bill hired a bartender whose name I've forgotten, but whose face I remember having the weathered good looks of someone like Harrison Ford. My job was to help him—I'll call him Michael—set the bar up before parties and then break it down after the guests were gone. Once I asked him what his job was during the day.
"Well," he said with a smile, "I used to be a cop, but they kicked me off the force."
"Why?"
"They had their reasons," was all he would say. Then he changed the subject, "Do you have a girlfriend?"
"Yes," I said.
"What's her name?"
"Beth."
"How long have you been going out?"
"About six months."
"At sixteen years old," he responded, "that must seem like an awfully long time."
I agreed that it did.
When it was time to leave, because I had more to say and I wanted to say it to him, I asked Michael if there was some place we could go to talk more. He smiled, "Sure, come on."
He took me to a bar called the Betsy Ross, where we sat in a booth against the back wall. I know we started to talk about Beth, but I remember nothing of our conversation because my attention was immediately riveted by two men who got up to dance. They each wore white, hip-hugging pants and skin-tight pastel shirts, and they wove their bodies together in movements far more erotic than any I'd ever seen men and women do together. Michael reached across the table and tapped me on the shoulder, "Richard, you realize you're in a gay bar, right?"
"I do now," I said.
"And that's okay?"
I nodded my head.
"I knew you'd be cool about it," Michael said, and he reached out and put his palm flat against my right cheek. "I'm not a cop anymore," he smiled sadly, "because I'm gay and I refused to hide it, and the law says if you're gay, you can't be a cop."
I liked Michael tremendously, and so I wish I could say that his revelation made me sad or angry, but I was more interested in watching the dancers. I was fascinated that men could be that gentle with each other, that physically intimate, and I wondered what it would be like to move that way with a friend.
A few weeks later, Bill turned to me as we were riding in his car on the way to a job, "I heard you and Michael went to the Betsy Ross after the last party."
"We did," I said. "I had a good time."
"That's good," Bill looked quickly over at me, then turned his attention back to the road. "Yeah, a blow job every once in a while will do you good."
The edge of accusation in Bill's voice took me completely by surprise. Not only had Michael not given me a blow job, but I couldn't imagine why the thought would even cross Bill's mind. Too shocked to respond, I said nothing, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.
When the party was over, after the rest of the crew had left, Bill wondered if I'd been doing the exercises he taught me. When I said yes, he asked me to show him. So I turned my back and stood with my palms against the nearest wall. As I began to rise on my toes, however, Bill cupped his hands over my butt. Every muscle in my body froze as he caressed me, gently kneading each cheek and bringing his mouth to just behind my ear, "You know, you have a dancer's cheeks, small and firm. Someday someone'll teach you how to use them."
The moment lasted for just a few seconds, and then Bill let me go, and I started to walk back to the tables I hadn't finished cleaning yet, my response identical to the one I'd had when the old man cornered me in the lobby of my building: behave as if nothing had happened. But then, with pinpoint accuracy, taking me completely by surprise, Bill rushed up behind me and clamped his fingers onto my perineum, pushing me on tiptoe across the floor. "Do you like to dance?" he asked rhetorically. "Dance for me!"
I clamped down on the scream that gathered in my gut and let the grip of his fingers guide, and I kept letting him guide me each time he did that, and had he wanted to, I probably would've let him do more, because I didn't know how to tell him to stop, as if being used was what my body had been born for.
